As a proud data governance partner of Snowflake, we are excited to showcase how Select Star supports Snowflake Horizon, Snowflake’s native governance solution designed to enhance compliance, security, privacy, and access management in data-driven environments. Snowflake makes it easy for customers to govern and take immediate action on data, apps, and more across clouds, teams, partners, and customers — both inside and outside of organizations. Integrations with other Apache Iceberg-compatible catalogs and engines, and with partners, further extend Snowflake Horizon across customers’ ecosystems.
As a part of the Snowflake partner ecosystem, our integration with Snowflake aims to bring technical efficiency and clarity to data governance processes, enhancing the overall security and governance capabilities for Select Star customers.
Data Privacy & Security
Snowflake object tagging allows users to set and retrieve object tags within their Snowflake account, and masking policies and row access policies allow organizations to set levels of access to sensitive data. Tagging and access policies are very helpful, however, still require users to manually tag all their data, and continue to update those tags as their data changes. This is where Select Star comes in.
Select Star integrates with Snowflake to help with the heavy lift of manual tagging and keeping tags up-to-date. Users can tag sensitive data within Select Star (from across their entire stack), and Select Star’s comprehensive column-level lineage will propagate those tags if the sensitive data has been replicated downstream (i.e. PROD.CUSTOMERS.ADDRESS is copied as-is into PLAYGROUND.CUSTOMERS.ADDRESS). In addition, users can set auto-tagging rules for sensitive data within Select Star, and all tags within Select Star can be synced directly back to Snowflake to be leveraged by Snowflake’s masking policies.
This way of using Snowflake object tagging allows Snowflake customers to manage all data classification coming from multiple sources in one place. Moreover, the role-based access control can be configured in a decoupled manner through Snowflake tags.
Data Discovery
Data discovery is a big part of improving efficiency by making information about data available, centralized and structured. Today, Select Star customers benefit from the following:
- Automatically generated data catalog for all their data assets, from tables, transformations to BI dashboards and charts
- Usage context for tables and dashboards, such as auto-generated ERDs, common joins, top users, and popularity
- A centralized place to customize additional context and metadata, such as owners, descriptions and data classifications
Select Star customers are able to quickly find the data and insights they are looking for, and get clear and deep context of the data with confidence.
Select Star accomplishes this with our proprietary query parser that supports multiple dialects of SQL. When combined with metadata and query or activity logs from Snowflake and other platforms, we are able to provide a much more accurate picture of lineage and the relationships between data.
Data Quality
Effective data organizations are constantly thinking about how to manage their data, from data migrations, planning data model changes, investigating data issues, data cleanup and managing data costs.
With our native integration with Snowflake, Select Star leverages Account Usage and Access History to provide a number of insights to assist with each.
- Data Migrations & Data Cleanup - Select Star shares insights on popularity on usage, letting you know what is being used, what is not, and who are the top users or dashboards to remodel.
- Data Model Changes & Investigating Data Issues - Select Star not only provides object metadata such as owners and top users, but also provides comprehensive table and column level lineage to narrow the scope in root cause analysis, and to quickly understand downstream impact in impact analysis.
- Managing Data Costs - Select Star’s Cost analysis helps data admins understand their Snowflake spend at the query, dashboard, warehouse and user level. By combining usage, lineage and Snowflake costs, Select Star helps identify your big ticket dashboards and most expensive queries (and who’s running them) to help you decide where to focus your optimization efforts.
With Select Star and Snowflake Horizon, customers can now experience unparalleled control and visibility over their data governance. By integrating with Horizon, Select Star automates the heavy lifting of tagging sensitive data, providing real-time insights into data lineage, and enabling role-based access control. This translates to customers being able to easily manage data classification from multiple sources in one place, ensure data privacy and security, and make data-driven decisions with confidence.
Ravi Kumar
Senior Partner Sales Engineer at Snowflake
Looking Forward
At Select Star, we see the growing necessity for advanced governance solutions among organizations. Select Star coupled with Snowflake addresses this need, equipping businesses with the tools to manage their data platform effectively.
Integrations for end-to-end data lineage, synchronized tagging for improved access control, and comprehensive usage understanding across data applications, mark a significant advancement in the industry. These innovations bring data governance into an era of adaptability and automation, essential in today's AI-driven landscape. With Snowflake, we're transforming data governance into a proactive, strategic asset for organizations navigating the complexities of modern data management.
